Don’t write, “The interest on the mortgage is due again next week and I’m sure I don’t know where the money is coming from.” Don’t tell your boys that you have had a bad spell of neuralgia and can hardly see to write. Don’t tell him that Jennie is doing badly in school and shows a sulky temper. Those are your worries, not his. He has responsibilities ahead of him, and possibly troubles and suffering immeasurably bigger than anything you face.
Above all, never deplore the fact that he is in the war, and never tell him that you are praying for an early peace. No American soldier whose mind has been enlightened to the true state of affairs in this war wants an early peace. He knows that an early peace would be a dangerous, a fatal, peace, one pleasing only to the Germans and their starving and enslaved allies.
In all the neutral countries, but even more in the allied countries, German propaganda is working overtime to bring about an early peace. German agents are everywhere trying to undermine the morale of the allied people, especially the women, and through them the soldiers. How they get into France is a mystery, but they get there, and they often remain undetected for a long time.
I remember visiting in the home of a simple bourgeois French family where the one remaining soldier son was home on leave. Three sons of that family had given up their lives for France, one at the Marne, one at Verdun, and one in the first battle of the Somme. The one remaining son was in a dangerous service, and perhaps one can hardly blame his mother and sisters for listening to any suggestion of a possible peace.
They had heard, one of the sisters said, as we sat at tea, without cream or cakes, or even bread, that France and Austria were about to sign a separate peace. They hoped the news was true, because then Italy would make peace, and the allies would only have to fight the Germans in France and Flanders.
“Never, my dear sister,” said the resolute young French soldier, “listen to any talk of that kind. Never repeat it, especially in the hearing of a soldier. We have our work to do, and you must help us, not weaken us. There is only one kind of peace we want, and that is the peace that will come when Germany is conquered.”
He got up from his seat and left the room, returning soon with a poster, one of the many beautiful and striking war posters the French have produced. This one showed a terrible procession of old men, women and children being driven from their homes by the advance of German troops. The Germans were striking the helpless people with the flat of their swords and laughing brutally at their sufferings.
“This is no fiction,” said the French soldier to me. “This is fact. And this is what would happen again in a few years if we made peace too soon. Why not end it for all time now? We men are ready to give our lives. We embrace the earth when we fall, for the sacrifice of a few lives now is nothing to the horrors that are in store for our children to come, unless we win, really win, this war.”
I said: “I will tell the American people what you have said, and what I know to be true, for I have seen something of this war, and I know what might happen in my country unless we win a complete victory.”
Because I am particularly concerned lest our women unwittingly weaken the least bit the morale and the fighting spirit of our soldiers, I am going to tell them what I have seen.